Over the last few years, the Internet has turned from a friendly neighborhood into an extremely hazardous and unpleasant environment, due to a small percentage of rogue users. Those rogue users, such as criminals and greedy companies, abuse the Internet for their own purposes and cause ethical users inconvenience and trouble.
Rogue users are responsible for painful developments, such as email spam, spyware/adware, computer viruses, email scams, phishing, brand theft, hate sites, instant messaging spam, remote vulnerability exploitation, typo-squatting, search engine spam, and much more.
Legal and technological measures have failed to keep the Internet clean. Email spam is a well-known example. During 2003, the average American Internet user received over a hundred, fifty-five spam emails every week. Numerous laws (such as, the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing (CAN-SPAM) Act of 2003, enacted on Jan. 1, 2004 as U.S. Public Law 109-187; 15 U.S.C. §§7701-7713, 18 U.S.C. §§1001, 1037; 28 U.S.C. §994; and 47 U.S.C. §227) have been enacted to halt this outraging abuse. Unfortunately, law enforcement is challenging due to the anonymous, rapidly changing and international nature of the Internet.
On the technology front, a growing number of anti-spam products attempt to passively defend users by filtering spam using a variety of technologies, such as probabilistic classification (see e.g., U.S. Pat. No. 6,161,130, entitled “Technique which Utilizes a Probabilistic Classifier to Detect ‘Junk’ E-mail by Automatically Updating a Training and Re-Training the Classifier Based on the Updated Training Set,” by Horvitz et al.); repeated message identification (see e.g., U.S. Pat. No. 6,330,590, entitled “Preventing Delivery of Unwanted Bulk E-mail,” by Cotton); sender address verification (U.S. Pat. No. 6,691,156, entitled “Method for Restricting Delivery of Unsolicited E-mail,” by Drummond, et al.); fixed string matching (see e.g., U.S. Pat. No. 6,023,723, entitled “Method and System for Filtering Unwanted Junk E-mail Utilizing a Plurality of Filtering Mechanisms,” by McCormick et al.); challenge-response mechanism (see e.g., U.S. Pat. No. 6,199,102, entitled “Method and System for Filtering Electronic Messages,” by Cobb); black listing of spam senders (see the Spamhaus project available on the Internet at http://www.spamhaus.org/)
However, such anti-spam measures merely provoke spammers to invent new technologies for bypassing them, as evident from U.S. Pat. No. 6,643,686, entitled “System and Method for Counteracting Message Filtering,” by Hall.
With more than 60% of the world's email traffic consisting of spam at the end of 2003, the spammers are clearly winning this arms race. It is interesting to note that the same kind of arms race exists with other forms of rogue online behavior, such as between virus writers and anti-virus vendors (see e.g., U.S. Pat. No. 6,357,008, entitled “Dynamic Heuristic Method for Detecting Computer Viruses Using Decryption Exploration and Evaluation Phases” by Nachenberg).
The constant battle between rogue users and filter vendors creates a cyclic process in every segment of the security market, in which the accuracy of a specific filtering technology diminishes as rogue users learn to bypass it. Filtering vendors then come up with new filtering schemes, which are resistant to current attack methods. These new filtering technologies are then released to the market and the cycle begins again.
Other kinds of technologies aim to make rogue behavior expensive by actually forcing rogue users to pay for each offense on a global basis (e.g., sending a spam email). Such a technology is presented in U.S. Pat. No. 6,697,462, entitled “System and Method for Discouraging Communications Considered Undesirable by Recipients,” by Raymond. However, effective use of such technologies would require worldwide changes to the Internet infrastructure, which thereby renders them impractical.
Other kinds of efforts aim to actively drive all rogue users out of business and attempt to stop them from attacking any legitimate user. For example, these efforts involve voluntarily seeding the Internet with faked addresses. While serving a good purpose, such efforts always fail because when they do become effective enough, rogue users are forced to find a way to overcome them, as no other alternative is offered to them. For example, rogue users have adapted their address harvesting methods to avoid faked addresses. In addition, many of these suggested active techniques are illegal in nature.
Therefore, in order to offer a viable solution, it would be desirable if more active measures could be used to establish deterrence on a practical level. For example, it would be desirable to provide a means whereby protective measures asserted on behalf of a limited amount of legitimate users could establish a certainty in the minds of rogue users that (1) attacking those protected legitimate users will yield no profit; and (2) not attacking those protected legitimate users will allow rogue users to continue most of their rogue activities toward other, non-protected, legitimate users. Of course, should deterrence fail, it would be further desirable to provide a means whereby legitimate users could win decisively.
Deterrence is a well-observed behavior in nature. It is used in predator-prey situations as protective means for prey. A typical deterrence scheme in nature is warning coloration (also known as aposematic coloration). Such coloration is found among animals that have natural defenses that they use to deter or fend off predators. It is quite common among insects and amphibians. For example, the poison dart frogs are known for their unique coloration as well as the poison they secrete from their skin. They are among the most successful of tropical frogs although they have small geographical range. They have very few predators and for a good reason. When predators attempt to eat such frogs they realize that they are poisonous and promptly spit them out. Predators then avoid frogs with similar warning coloration on subsequent encounters.
Therefore, a need exists for systems and methods that reduce or eliminate rogue online activity by actively deterring rogue users, rather than passively protecting legitimate users.